In 1871 a local entrepreneur named Anthony Bannister formed the Withernsea Pier, Promenade, Gas & General Improvement Company - a Victorian name for a Victorian ambition. The railway from Hull had reached Withernsea, and Bannister saw what every seaside speculator of the 1870s saw: factory workers with a free day and money in their pockets, looking for somewhere with sea air. The pier was meant to extend 1,200 feet straight out from the station, on iron piles driven 380 feet below the low-water mark - long enough to be useful for landing fish and embarking passengers as well as strolling. Construction began in February 1875 under engineer Thomas Cargill. That same March a crane collapsed during the works and crushed a seventeen-year-old boy to death. He is the first name in the pier's long account of damage.

The pier opened as a partial structure in August 1875, and was finally completed - quietly, without ceremony - on Friday 18 August 1877. Final length was 1,196 feet, width fourteen feet, sixteen feet above the high-tide mark. Visitors paid a penny to walk out over the sea. The trouble started immediately. A February 1877 storm pulled down struts and bent girders, delaying the opening. On 28 October 1880 a fierce North Sea gale drove the brig Jabez into the pierhead - she sank with all hands - and at the same time the coal barge Saffron struck the middle of the structure, gouging out a gap. The Withernsea Pier company, already in financial trouble, left the gap unrepaired for nearly a year. They patched it with plain wood in 1881 and filed for bankruptcy that December. A March 1883 gale tore away the seaward end. The fishing smack Genesta - whose captain had died at sea in a wreck that prompted the local coroner to demand a Withernsea lighthouse - was herself driven into the pier in October 1890, taking another 300 feet.

On the stormy night of 22 March 1893, the vessel Henry Parr struck the pier head-on. Spectators watched the collision in what newspaper accounts described as a shower of sparks as iron tore through iron. When morning came, only fifty feet of pier remained extending from the castellated towers. A lighthouse for Withernsea was built and lit in March 1894 - a year too late. The remaining stump was finally removed during the seafront remodelling of 1903. The pier had stood, in working form, for just twenty-six years. By 1888 it had been free to schoolchildren, orphans and blind people; by 1903 it was free to nobody, because it was gone.

The Withernsea Pier and Promenade Association announced ambitious plans in the 21st century: a new 500-foot pier, half the length of the original but wider, built in stages from the towers outward. By January 2021 the first phase - a viewing platform extending from the towers, originally costed at £70,000 in 2016 - had been approved at £235,000. The full pier was projected at around £8 million. In May 2023 the project was formally abandoned, with the group telling the BBC that the new structure was no longer viable. The two yellow-brick towers remain on the seafront where they have always stood, facing the same North Sea, framing the same empty horizon their pier once crossed.